Do a dominant state's policies have a greater effect on a rising state's threat perceptions or its assessment of the dominant state's resolve? Existing theory, rooted in Jervis's spiral and deterrence models, contends that ...

In this dissertation, I ask four inter-related questions about state-sponsored terrorism. First, under what conditions do states choose to support foreign terrorist groups? Second, when do sponsor states stop supporting ...

Ethnic civil wars are the most abundant form of large-scale, deadly conflict in the world today, yet the dedicated study of ethnic civil war is relatively new within political science. One empirical observation repeated ...

This dissertation seeks to identify the causes of genocide and mass killing. Many of the most widely accepted explanations of genocide and mass killing seek the causes of these events in the social structure, system of ...

This thesis proposes a theory mapping emotional reactions to political information onto a theory of vote decisionmaking and then further onto measurable survey response. Using on-line processing based in emotion, voters ...

Counterinsurgency was a persistent and important challenge to military organizations in the second half of the 20th century and seems likely to continue to pose a challenge in the 21st century. This makes understanding how ...

I examine America's reputation for sustaining casualties (i.e., foreign perceptions of American casualty sensitivity) in order to test and shed light on the larger "reputation" hypothesis. For the purposes of this paper, ...

Economic crises are such powerful socioeconomic disasters that, not surprisingly, they are usually explained by powerful socioeconomic pressures, such as global financial speculation, structural economic failure, or populist ...

This dissertation is driven by the following question: "What explains the variation in governments' civil liberty-abridging responses to terrorist attacks?" In the United States, it was not until a year after the 1995 ...

In the modern world, social order is most often maintained by states, using a complex web of institutions, norms, and systems to control the population and govern their actions. In this dissertation, I ask how groups ...

This dissertation investigates the policy-making process that led to three "crash programs" for alternative fuels after energy shocks in the 1970s and early 2000s: (1) the proposed Energy Independence Authority in 1975-1976, ...

This thesis considers electronic countermeasures as well thought-out signals sent by the "attacker" to a recipient, the "defender" in order to create uncertainty, and argues that tactics that incorporate the judicious use ...

As non-traditional security threats such as terrorism and organized transnational crime gain greater prominence around the globe, the need for international cooperation against these non-state actors has consequently ...

In this thesis, I ask three questions about the nature of power transition theory. First, I ask whether power transition theory can be generalized beyond identification of great powers or regional hierarchies. Lemke and ...